torsdag, oktober 07, 2010

O God of justice and mercy, we pray that no more daughters and sons in this world die as the result of bullying simply because of who they are; be it race, religion, sexual orientation, or social awkwardness. Lord, in your mercy,hear our prayer.

That our schools become places of nurturing and hope rather than shame and derision. Lord, in your mercy,hear our prayer.

That our teachers instill values of charity and acceptance in all children so there is no need for one child to feel superior over another. Lord, in your mercy,hear our prayer.

That parents can put aside what they were sometimes taught, in order to promote tolerance and diversity at home. Lord, in your mercy,hear our prayer.

That our communities support children who feel “different from the others” and show them lives that are theirs to claim, lives they cannot begin to imagine to see at home. Lord, in your mercy,hear our prayer.

That all children can grow up feeling self-empowered and truly loved simply as themselves, and not suffer beatings and psychological abuse at home or school. Lord, in your mercy,hear our prayer.

O Lord, you understand this above all others, for your only Son hung among thieves on a rough wooden cross on a barren hill, just as Matthew Shepard hung from a rail fence on a lonely road. Be our light in the darkness, Lord; protect our children and fill them with the love of your Holy Spirit; hold them in your Son’s loving arms in their most fearful hours, and be with them always.Amen.

From Counterlight:I've noticed that the latest spate of young gay suicides have really struck a nerve with LGBTs. I think the reason is clear, we've all been through this. Michael went through it. I went through it. In mid 1970s Texas, I was a very lonely and suicidal gay teen. Michael was badly bullied in mid 1980s Long Island. We all go through this, and most of us survive, but some of us don't. Each loss is irreplaceable, a life that might have been and now never will be. Each loss is another victory for the haters who would love to see us removed in one way or another from the face of the earth.

On the one hand, there really has been a lot of progress, I would never have dreamed of seeing an openly gay and an openly lesbian Episcopal bishop with the support of their church thirty years ago.On the other hand, in some fundamental ways, we are still stuck right where we were on that steamy night in June of 1969 when the riots started at the Stonewall Inn. This was demonstrated forcefully in a discussion of the legacy of Stonewall staged by Brian Lehrer and the local Public Radio station, WNYC between some Stonewall veterans and a group of LGBT youth. What was so striking was not the differences, but the similarities in the experiences of the veterans and the kids. Really little had changed in how hard it was to come of age as gay between then and now.The historian David Carter, who wrote what will probably stand as the definitive account of the Stonewall riots, pointed out that gays and lesbians still enjoy no legal protection on the federal level. There are no federal laws forbidding discrimination against LGBTs in housing or employment. What legal protections LGBTs have are a hodge podge of state and local laws that vary considerably from place to place. Cities and states frequently have conflicting anti-discriminatory laws (like between New York City and New York State). Some cities are legally gay friendly in the middle of gay hostile states (Austin). There are numerous states and communities that openly desire to re-criminalize the status of LGBTs despite the Supreme Court and Texas vs. Lawrence.

Homophobia remains the last socially acceptable bigotry. The idea that being gay is the worst possible thing in the world for men is still a staple of very machismo oriented contemporary youth culture and the industries that profit from it. Our culture is soaking in it. It is inescapable. It has gotten particularly nasty since it is now openly challenged and called to account. Churches are leading villains in this struggle. Pulpits create that sense of spiritual permission for the haters by singling out gays and lesbians as either creatures from hell, or as God's mistakes. Indeed, what comes from the pulpits is basically an apologia for extermination, either in the extreme and literal form advocated by the likes of Fred Phelps, or more commonly through "reparative therapy," the idea that gays can be "changed."

These suicides are a brutal reminder that our struggles are far from over, both our political and our personal struggles. There is no Glinda the Good Witch to help us out. We aren't wearing any ruby slippers. The Emerald City isn't any friendlier to us than Kansas was. The Wicked Witches are legion, and they really do want to kill us all.But, they really will melt with a bucket of cold water thrown on them. It is our courage, our hearts, our brains, and above all our friendship and solidarity that will get us all down the yellow brick road together.

ADDENDUM:

There were 2 bashings here in New York in what are supposed to be safe neighborhoods for gays. One of them was right in the Stonewall Bar. Apparently 2 palookas from Staten Island had no idea what kind of bar they walked into, yelled homophobic curses, and then tried to rob and beat one of the patrons.

As usual Joe.My.God had all the dirt and details.

And speaking of apologias for extermination coming from the pulpit, Dan Savage, as usual, minces no words:

My good Christian friends, I think he is spot on about this. I think our proper response should not be to complain about Dan Savage painting all Christians with the right wing brush. There's a much bigger and more desperate issue involved than the reputation of our faith . Our Lord can take care of Himself, with or without our help. The Christian Faith will survive even those who ask "What Would Jesus Do?" while dragging that very faith through the mud of bigotry. Those who do need our help (as well as Our Lord's) most desperately are those very people who Dan Savage rightly describes as seeing nothing but despair in their futures. It is our responsibility as Christians to those kids, to the rest of the world, and to ourselves to dispel all the obsolete and bad science used in bad faith to demonize and pathologize sexual minorities, to dispel the really toxic heresies that proclaim parts of God's Creation to be exceptions to His declaration that His Creation (ALL of it) is Good, and to dispel the monomaniacal and downright psychotic obsession of Christian leaders and institutions with matters of sex and control. It is up to us to present to the world an alternative vision of church as a community grounded in love of God through love for each other and the world instead of as spiritual buttress for the prevailing hierarchy and spiritual enforcer of social convention.

Perhaps it's time to think about replacing the image of Christ the King (kingship is obsolete, even as a metaphor) with Christ the Liberator. Deus Optimus Maximus et Christus Liberator.

onsdag, augusti 11, 2010

No, the story of Sodom and Gomorra (the names allude to the destruction of the site through an earthquake) is not about rape, That is a thoroughly late Modern invention.

The only (suggested, heterosexual) rape in the story never comes off!

The rape angle comes after D.S. Bailey's book Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition in 1955, that is it enters late Mo-dern "translations" in the 10 following years. The 1962 revision of the 1569/1602 Spanish Reina-Valera hasn't got it, but the highly politicized French 1957 Bible de Jérusalem and all later "trans-lations" have it...

What is being intentionally mis-translated is the word ina sunge-nåmetha autois; that we may know them, in Genesis 19:4. The claim (Renaissance) is that the root gnå- means sex. It doesn't. It means to know...

The root gnå- occurs some 943 times in the Bible (1 in the NT) but in only 8 cases can it refer to Hetero-sex. Genesis 4:1 And the man (=Adam) knew his wife, is one example.

Sungenåmetha is a different word altogether.

Mind you, the 8 cases are all Imperfect aorist!!!

Also, as it is Loot himself, the Husbander; the Pater familias, who suggests the rape of his daughters, it really isn't.

Antiquity, as well as pre Modern Societies, didn't count this as rape at all!!! See the various (and varying) stories of Abram and Sarai in Genesis 12:11ff, 20:2 - 18, and Isaak and Rebekka in Genesis 26:7...

tisdag, augusti 10, 2010

Once again Chris, I remind you that you are talking of transla-tions. And yes, almost all are without any merit whatsoever.

Remember also the Mazorets. To them, and later generations, the Holy Scriptures in the plural must be copied meticulously to avoid any further errors. Not even the most blatant and obvious faults may be corrected!

The in-sufficiency and dis-harmony of scripture rules.

Today I have completed work on the sexualization of II Commandment porneía and VII Commandment moixeía in the Swedish tradition from the Parisian Versio vulgata of ca 1200.

It comes in 5 columns: Greek text, Versio vulgata, Swedish 1526, 1917 and 1981/2000. Quotes would be no use, but I can give you the statistics ;=)

In the NT there are 45 porneía in the Greek against 47 “unchas-tity” in the translations…

The extras are Romans 13:13 Koítais; Beds (I suggest you look that one up!), and 2 Peter 2:14 moixalídos; "their (masc.) eyes are full of disloyalty".

5 of the 33 II Commandment moixeía refer to the customer into sacral prostitution, to which comes the 12 pornä; the poor unfortunate women sold to the Temple for this kind of Idolatry (still around in India). Of these 12 pornä, 9 are 2nd century (5 in Rev).

The Versio vulgata (I have used the 1895 online, for simplicity’s sake) renders most porneía as fornicatio (a loanword from the same root: por/per), but 2 as prostitutione/is.

Moreover, it has an addedfornicatione (in Romans 1:29).

To which comes 1 porneía rendered as homicidae (Rev 22:15), which gives the ideology away: to 1st Millennium Hellenists little boys will end up in Limbus infantorum whenever Sperm (concei-ved of as seeds ;=) is wasted for non procreative purposes = MURDER! (to the straight edge Gnosticists procreation meant bringing an Angel down forcibly from Bliss near The Highest Being cloaking it in the DUST of the Vale of Tears...).

The Swedish 1526 has 10 ”hor-” (including 5 additional) which formally are from the root per-/por-/forn-/hor. Against this comes 31 bolerij, which is the sexualized Scholastic understan-ding of the Parisian Versio vulgata.

To this come 4 skörheet/skörachtigheet/skörleffnat; madness, and 1 ”icke oäkta födde”; ”not born in bastardy” for the persons in John 8:41 who were not conceived in Cultic prostitution.

4 of the 47 Bible 2000 translations are (accidentally) from the actual root: per-/por-/forn-/hor; horat/horkarl, but still wrong ;=)

Conclusion: the proportions have been inverted.

The 10 porneías (all 2nd century) referring (in some sense) to the VII Commandment and translated as “unchastity” (in some sense), are correct.

But out of the 33 porneía referring to II Commandment Idolatry, not a single translation is correct (all are rendered as “unchasti-ty”), and only 4 are even based on the root per-/por-/forn-/hor (which never referred to Idolatry in Swedish).

And remember, that the Textus receptus (which has its merits being of the General Text) was much manipulated in the early 16th century. Erasmus and the others excised most of the late Byzantineadditions, substituting them with the Scholastic additions from the Versio vulgata.

(which, BTW, means that they were fully aware of what they were doing ;=)

“So far we have had the right and sure main books of the New Testament. But these four that here follow have had a different reputation in antiquity…” ;=)

Chris wrote: "... to undo most the Reformation and flies in the face of God tearing the Temple veil and opening the Gospel to the gentiles."

The other way around, surely? (but don't blame it on me)

Chris wrote: "Please feel free to do so, but please be honest and not use the Scripture for any case you try to make, as your trans-lation is worthless..."

I do my own translations, thank you.

But regarding worthless translations, let’s mention the NIV and all the other "Dynamic Equivalence" ones...

(before DE, there was no "gay" question in the churches – NO one put "homosexual" in a translation, isn't that reason to pause?)

NP wrote: "Yep...that is how we got Lambeth 1.10 – but you don't care about the view of "whole church" when it conflicts with what you want, do you, Erika?"

Intentionally corrupted DE translations and misdirected Bibli-cism ia chaotic meeting lead to Lambeth 1998 I:10 (remember there are 14 more non-binding "resolutions" from Lambeth 1998 ;=)

So no, He does not "protect His Word".

Only the other day (Epistle on 8th after Holy Trinity) I found that the words en Sarkí have been excised from the Last Swedish State translation (made by 2 converts to Rome) in 1 John 4:1-6, making an anti-Doketic statement Doketic.

(There are a few of these in the Johannine writs, as you know;=)

"Thus you can see which Spirit is from God; each Spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ is come "in human likeness" is from God, but the spirit which denies Jesus is not from God. It's the Spirit of Anti-Christ..."

The Docetist "in human likeness" should read en Sarkí; in the Flesh.

Now, Flesh is a Biblical concept, central to the Biblical understanding of Creation and so on.

So far I have found 38 different Pseudonyms for it in the 1981/2000...

The most amusing psudonyme for Flesh being "that way" ;=)

As the 1981/2000 is Dynamic Equivalent there is no concordance; one has to go through every verse...

I quite understand if you do not care much for the victims of hate crimes (or accept the category), but you must be able to see that this is a Soteriological and Theological point of no small consequence.

måndag, augusti 09, 2010

To start from the end… The elder the translation, the more reliable, in my experience. The Swedish 1526/1541 is infinitely better than any of the 20th century ones (and much closer to Greek language-wise).

Modern translations are often worthless, especially when into “Dynamic Equivalence” (a sobering is on the way, as in the 2001 English Standard Version turning back to the traditional post scholastic errors/sexualizations – which, contrary to DE ones, are systematic and thus easy to spot ;=)

Generally speaking, only ideologically un-interesting passages are still correctly translated, often carried on from the 2nd century North African, very reliable, Old Latin translation.

That’s one for continuity!

However, count on everything socio-politically prostitutable to have been changed – often several times over.

The 4 gospels were all added to early on. In reading they must be kept apart from one another. At Lund we were told, both at the Theological Institution and at Seminary, never to mix Marcan with Johannine theology, and so on.

Mark, written for Rome, is the more original story gospel (the first stage being collections of words gospels such as the late 2nd century in part Gnosticist Gospel of Thomas), arguing against earlier merely wonder-maker versions. I would date this to the 40ies, even.

Follows Antiochene Dr Luke much into Herstory (Lukas might have been a lady ;=)

John of Efesos is Theology more than anything – slightly Gnostic (but not yet Gnosticist). Great for meditation, but not much so for reading out loud.

Matt, to my mind is unequivocally Alexandrian, 120-140ies. That is, after the 130 2nd Jewish War break with (outlawed) Judaism.

Matt not seldom follows the published letters of Paul against Mark and Luke giving Idolatry as permissible cause for divorce – inverting Paul in 1 Cor 7:12-17, who argues against the compulsory religious/ethnic divorce of Ezraism, see Ezra 10).

But then, the letters of Paul were only published c:a 100 ;=)

The earliest text-witnesses (often translations) such as the Greek/Latin Codex Bezae (a 440ies copy of a 170-180 original, perhaps by Ireneos himself) representing the first half of the 2nd century, already show changes (both textual, as for instance, the “and he said, saying” indicating quotes from Jesus, and accommodations to the surrounding World, as in the relegating of women back to Kinder und Küche).

Given all this (remember, dearest Erica; that we are not yet free from Integrism!) I still confidently say that the Holy Scriptures (always in the plural) of the Church, laboriously collected over centuries, contain all things necessary for Salvation but also things that may be detrimental, if mistaken for the real thing.

I also say with Paul (1 Cor 4.6), Dr Hooker and the Swedish 1593 Confessio fidei, that nothing beyond what is written is to be required of anybody – which, however, to my mind (I have no other) is precisely what is being done today, by anti Moderns posing as the guardians of Faith (Christian) and Morals (Gnosticist ravings on the Spilling of Semen and the Neo Platonist State Absolutist fiction that Oppression is necessary for Stabilitas).

The answer to the accusation that the traditions of men are un-reliable is, of course, that there has been, since very early on, a death penalty for forgery, but no corresponding one for a week memory…

In fact, traditions are reliable. Documents are not.

Collections many times the biblical format have survived more or less unscathed for quite as long. On the other hand, for whoever wants to, documents are easy to change; which is why the Mazorets didn’t want to “correct” even “obvious” errors and omissions.

It’s only the Way of the World…

Indeed what is fascinating about these conversations is that the Gospel has been heard, despite all the Efforts of the World!

From Carolingian times Academia and State have been preaching Hierarchy, Subordination, Exclusion, Hate, Crusades, 6 Phantom categories, Burnings, Hell and Damnation…

The Social discipline of Empire.

And yet, people have heard Equality, Emancipation, Inclusion, Love, and Mutuality.

The Gospel of God’s Righteousness in Christ Jesus.

Which is what God whispers softly when you read the Good Book talking to your heart.

What I can contribute as someone with a degree, are bits of learning and some scattered insights that come to me because of my peculiar place in time and space. Individual circumstances and a certain goût de la véritée allow me to indicate some directions where to dig for hidden truth.

Despite all the efforts of Empire, the Gospel still belongs to all of us through the Church and through the Good Book – even when “modified” to suit the latest fashions ;=)

Gods tender Mercy knows no bounds,his Truth shall never decay…

From a conversation on Thinking Anglicans three years ago. And thank's to Erika who tipped me off.

Hebrews should be read as the great and isolated Alexandrian letter that it is.

Remember that the various collections of scriptures that were brought together over 1000 years to form the different post Renaissance NTs, came from different parts of the Church, expressing the varying and sometimes competing theologies of competing Patriarchates/Nations.

The 4 gospels of the one Gospel are not "synoptic"; they tell much the same events in much the same order (with illuminating exceptions) but have different views, not the same - as do the Letters.

To Paul Christ is the Hilasterion in the Holiest of Holy, to Hebrews Christ is the High Priest sprinkling it ;=)

Ephesians and Colossians are the same scripture (again a treatise, not a letter) with different views/evaluations. Put them side by side and compare. What Ephesians (maybe Bishop Onésimos of Efesos) calls “rubbish”, the other (maybe Marcion) gets upset about.

The Johannine Apokalypsis was not accepted in an Alexandria (which was suspicious of the Johannine letters as well) which had its own apokalypsis; the 1000-page Hermas' Shepherd, along with Barnabas’ anti Jewish letter (again not a letter but a treatise), and so on…

The late 2nd/early 3rd century Alexandrian redaction (Clement of Alexandria; the p 46 & c.) re-worked, corrected and harmo-nized by the 5th century Byzantine redaction, did not acknowled-ge the Pastorals, too close in time to be taken as authentic (and – according to the “Muratoria” list – written as one redacted anti-Marcionite letter, in the order Titus, 1 Tim, 2 Tim), but tried to promote it’s own Alexandrian scriptures instead ;=)

Likewise, the "Catholic" letters (= general letters lacking addresses) of Alexandria were not accepted in neighbouring Antioch for several centuries...

Modern (and antique) Integrism is wrong.

The view of the Early Church (see Eusebios’ Church History) was that any scripture could witness to the Righteousness of God in Christ; any scripture could contain grains of Truth.

Nothing was dangerous; (almost) nothing was magic.

The view of “scripture” of the Early Church was neither "high" or low, but w i d e.

The Church collected its Holy Scriptures because they gave witness to her Faith in different Patriarchates, at different moments in time.

Precisely because they were different!

We do not have 4 gospels of the one Gospel to say the same thing. They don’t. The Bible is Jewish scriptures, not Indo European ones...

Leaving the Pastorals apart (which as early as the mid 2nd century present the absolute opposite to Paul's teachings on Society, Church and State, women, slaves, Olympics, military service & c, as his own) the "problem" you refer to divides into two:

1. Integrism, or simply put the lumping together of various scriptural utterances to form new hitherto un-heard of "teach-ings", legitimizing ancient heathen Philosophy and Gnosticism and/or latter day social and ecclesiastical Politics,

2. Forged translations, from the late 12th century Parisian Versio vulgata onwards, putting these latter day State and Academy novelties into the sacred texts themselves (in our time leading to the re-circulation and re-processing of earlier, dated, forgeries to express late modern, socio-political "needs").

So I am warning against reading the Holy Scriptures in the plural un-wittingly as the Holy Scripture in the singular of Hellenism.

My point is not what the NPs of this world say, that the Bible, or the Church , or Creation, or Christ or God should be painted in the light of a late modern socio-political agenda, but that this forging lies in the past; 9th century, 12th century, 16th century, second half of the 20th century ("Dynamic Equivalence"), and that it is our duty to fight it and bring the Holy Scriptures of the Church back to Christ's Gospel after 1000 years of servitude to the Powers that be.

I don’t really think changing Idolatry into “sex”, or Disloyalty into “marriage breaking”, or Greed into “unchastity” is merely adding layers.

It’s a different Gospel.

“Dynamic equivalence” is a Lie. Not even an “and” is unambi-guous, it may mean a host of things. As basically a historian, I have is no use of a text if I don’t know both what the words may mean and what they cannot mean.

Both are equally important.

Distorting it in our image, or giving it the meaning of a 3rd or 4th language, only proves that we actually do not care what the Bible says!

All claims to the contrary are so many Freudian slips ;=)

Erika wrote: “I suppose the real question is whether we believe that, despite their limitations, they nevertheless form part of continued, Spirit guided revelation, or whether all additions and forgeries are inherently uninspired and must be disregarded as false innovations.”

I don’t know if “inspired” is very helpful here. Of course they are “inspired”… by something ;=)

Per the Early Church, all scriptures, no matter how much they might be “holy scripture” to whomever, may contain logoi spermatikoì; seeds of Truth, and as such form part of an ongoing Spirit-guided revelation. This is part of the background to the important discussion about historical typoi; OT pre-views and fulfilments.

Christ, the Word in Creation, is present in Creation from day one, before the Incarnation.

Personally, I find parts of what I believe to be by Marcion (for instance Romans 1:18-25 or 8:38-39 and Colossians) to be some of the most beautiful and most inspired (because unprecedented), and therefore inspiring words in the NT. But I don’t think the concept of “God’s Wrath” (I think it must have been God's Grace originally) towards Creation is at all useful, or even compatible with the view that the same God created his Creation very good and sent his only begotten to save it, to bring it back to Him.

fredag, augusti 06, 2010

Homosexuals were with us in Auschwitz and were persecuted along with Jews throughout Western societies for the past several thousand years, so we stand with them in the struggle for full acceptance and full legal equality, including marriage equality, in the 21st century. But even had they not shared our fate, the denial of rights and the double standards used to justify such denials are always a threat to Jews as well as to everyone else on the planet!

The rights of homosexuals are supported by an overwhelming majority of the American Jewish community. That support is not only based on a memory of shared victimhood, but also on the core values of our own Jewish tradition. The Torah's command to 'love our neighbor' and 'love the Other (stranger, in Hebrew: ger)' are intrinsic to how most American Jews understand our Jewish obligations today. The current (July/August) issue of Tikkun Magazine has as its major focus "Queer Spirituality & Politics" with a powerful essay by Jay Michaelson on "Why Gay Rights is A Religious Issue" plus other essays by Starhawk, Jay Bakker, yvette A. Flunder, Emi Kyami, Joy Ladin, Parvez Sharma, Andrea Smith, Dean Space, Ruth Vanita and other glbtq writers and thinkers. In fact, Tikkun was the first place to publish an essay by a (then) closeted homosexual rabbi discussing his struggle, and we have severely criticized those parts of the Jewish religious world which still do not sanctify gay marriages. As a rabbi, I've had the honor to conduct many such marriages in the S.F. Bay Area, as have many of my colleagues around the country in the Jewish Renewal movement, in the Reform movement, and in the Reconstructionist movement.

The claim by some fundamentalists that gay love is forbidden by the Bible is itself an interpretation and a selective reading of Biblical text. Few of those fundamentalists demand that their society take literally the command to forgive all loans every seventh year (the Sabbatical Year) or to redistribute the land every fiftieth year (the Jubilee) or to not light a fire in their homes on the Sabbath, or for that matter, the command to not destroy the trees of your enemy when engaged in warfare, but they selectively choose this command for special attention.

As to the literalists, well, then be literal: the command says 'Thou shalt not lie with a man the way thou liest with a woman." Ok, fine, but that doesn't say thou shalt not lie with a man, but only that one must do so in a different way than one lies with a woman. The contrast is clear in Leviticus, because all of the other commands about sexual behavior in the same section are unconditional 'thou shalt not lie with x or y or z' but only here is the command extended in that way to qualify how it should be applied. While this interpretation is not the only one possible, it demonstrates why Jews have been involved in transforming the meanings of Biblical texts in accord with our own evolving understanding and evolving ethical sensibilities. So, for example, the rabbis of the Talmud, when faced with the Biblical injunction to stone to death a rebellious son, were so uncomfortable with the morality of that command that they proclaimed, shamelessly transforming the literal meaning of the text, that 'a rebelious son never existed and was never created', i.e. that whatever the Torah was referencing was fine, but it was in fact not to be confused with what we mean in our daily life experience by a rebellious child. The point is that Judaism has always found a way through creative re-interpretation of texts to hear God's voice afresh in every generation and to recognize that re-hearing as "the oral Torah given on Mt. Sinai and passed on from generation to generation." I detail this perspective in my 1994 national best-seller Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (Putnam hardback; HarperCollins,paperback 1995).

So if it's not about Biblical constraints, what is it about? Fear or hatred of gays is one level of understanding, and certainly correct. Yet for many male homophobes there is another level: the fear that homosexuals remind them of a part of them that was repressed as they adopted their male identity in their early years (5-15): the part that loved and identified with their own mother and hence with the desire to embody and be nourished by that love-oriented and generosity-oriented part that became sex-stereotyped as "female." Because this "femaie element" had to be rejected by young boys in order to be accepted as "a real man" there was an intense need to repress that part of them which identified with their mother and with the loving element she represented. The harder it was to give that up, the more intense the repression that young boys have had to incorporate into their being in order to fit in to the emerging male identities which they are offered by the other kids at school and by the media and the ethos of a patriarchal culture.

This is not the same as saying, as is commonly asserted, that they were all "really" homosexuals to start with. I don't believe that there is an essentialist sexual identity in that way. Rather, I'm claiming that boys have constructed their sexual identity by having to repress their most loving parts, and the more vulnerable they are to the pain of that abandonment of part of themselves and their mothers that they really loved, the more they have been forced to become super-macho, one of whose dimensions is to repress anything that resembles a "girlie" part (remember how Gov. Schwarznegger accused Democrats in 2004 of being "girlie men" and how the Dems were unable to respond in the way they should have, by affirming that it is a complment to be compared to a girl, and that those who don't understand that are deeply troubled human beings).

Since homosexual males are equated by the homophobes as girlish and weak, those afflicted by the need to repress that part of their identity, usually starting at a very young age, are most fearful of homosexuality and then of homosexuals.

Please note that this analysis avoids putting down the homophobes--I see them as themselves victims of patriarchal society, and people who need psychological and spiritual help, not people to be ridiculed, though I and Tikkun have been consistently committed to fighting the policies that they would impose on the rest of us. One must be compassionate and forgiving toward others with whom we disagree on ethical issues, but forgiveness does not require us to stop struggling against the policies and institutions that wounded people have created to dominate our lives, and against their oppressive beliefs and behaviors.

Tikkun magazine also recognizes that the decision to overturn the ban on gay marriage is a victory for all of us who support separation of religion and state, since those who seek to impose that restriction are simply trying to impose their particular religious beliefs on the society as a whole. Avoiding that was a major reason for the First Amendment to the Constitution. So we hail the decision by Judge Vaughn Walker and hope that it will be sustained in the appeal process through the federal courts, though we share the concern of many that this most reactionary Supreme Court in 70 years may end up siding with the homophobes and haters.

Please feel free to reprint this and send it to everyone you know. And also please help Tikkun by making a tax-deductible contribution at www.tikkun.org or by joining our INTERFAITH educational and outreach arm, The Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org. Do it now, please!

And if you happen to be in the Bay Area during the Jewish High Holidays, please consider registering to come to our religious services for Rosh Hashanah and/or Yom Kippur (others have come from around the country in past years just to attend these services). The services will be held at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Ca. Information on dates, costs, and registration at www.BEYTTIKKUN.org. Or call Mike Godbe at 510 528 6250. I think you will find our services a unique spiritual experience.